Category Archives: Alcohol in the News

A few months back, I posted on wine vending machines coming to Pennsylvania.  I recently spotted this on Dr. Vino’s blog:

Bring your own bottle and pick your poison - white, red or pink.

Astrid Terzian came up with the idea, installing her first machine in Dunkirk in June 2009, and has since followed up with 9 machines across France.  The wines tend to cost around $2 per liter!

I’ve had great luck filling up bottles out of casks at mom and pop joints in Spain and in Italy and I hope Dr. Vino is correct when he anticipates we’ll see something like this in the U.S. within a year.

Lettie Teague shares a bizarre wine experience this week in her WSJ blog.

An article ran last week in SF Gate about several restaurants in California and beyond starting to serve wine on tap.

Gus Vahlkamp, one of the wine directors interviewed, stated, “One of the things that’s always bothered me about wine prices is that you can’t get a decent glass of wine for the price of draft beer…here you can try a glass, and it’ll cost you $4.”  Hells, yeah.

I just read today in NY Mag that the new branch of Terroir opening in Tribeca will feature a Finger Lakes Riesling on tap.  I hope it’s just the beginning.

More plausible than keeping hearts young or preventing extensive brain damage following a stroke, red wine may increase women’s libido!

Doctors at the University of Florence studied 800 women, aged 18-50, and split them into 3 groups; those who regularly consumed 1 or 2 glasses of red wine per day, those who consumed less than 1 glass per day of any type of wine or alcohol and those who didn’t consume any alcohol at all.

They chose to exclude women who drank more than 2 glasses per day, removing inebriation as an obvious study flaw.

All participants filled out a questionnaire titled “Female Sexual Function Index”, which is apparently used by doctors to assess women and their sexual health. It’s 19 questions long and the final scores can range from 2-36, with higher scores equating better function. Sounds like something you’d find in Cosmo or Seventeen, don’t you think?

The red wine drinkers averaged 27.3, while those who consumed less frequently averaged 25.9 and those who abstained clocked in around 24.4. These results have been published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine.

The exact correlation between the red wine and better sexual function is unclear (shocker), but one of the current theories is that antioxidants in the red wine widen the blood vessels, therefore increasing blood flow to key areas of the female body.

The study doesn’t clarify whether the red wine is actually doing something to women’s libidos or whether women who have healthy sexual appetites also have a healthy thirst for wine, but regardless, viva red wine!  I’d buy into this before I’d be convinced that chocolate is good for my health.